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The renaissance of General Relativity: How and why it happened
Author(s) -
Blum Alexander S.,
Lalli Roberto,
Renn Jürgen
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
annalen der physik
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.009
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1521-3889
pISSN - 0003-3804
DOI - 10.1002/andp.201600105
Subject(s) - general relativity , theory of relativity , theoretical physics , physics , gravitation , ligo , einstein , gravitational wave , epistemology , astronomy , classical mechanics , philosophy
After an initial burst of excitement about its extraordinary implications for our concept of space and time, the theory of general relativity underwent a thirty‐year period of stagnation, during which only a few specialists worked on it, achieving little progress. In the aftermath of World War II, however, general relativity gradually re‐entered the mainstream of physics, attracting an increasing number of practitioners and becoming the basis for the current standard theory of gravitation and cosmology‐a process Clifford Will baptized the Renaissance of General Relativity. The recent detection of gravitational radiation by the LIGO experiment can be seen as one of the most outstanding achievements in this long‐lasting historical process. In the paper, we present a new multifaceted historical perspective on the causes and characteristics of the Renaissance of General Relativity, focusing in particular on the case of gravitational radiation in order to illustrate this complex and far‐reaching process.